selfpublishing

“Werewolf wrestler gets told he has to lose the last fight of his career or he won’t get any retirement money. There are complications.”

Today is the day. The ebook version of Lost Dogs #1: Last Fight of the Old Hound, is now available for purchase, here.

It’s a big deal for me, and it’s been a long time coming, so I’m quite excited now it’s finally here. Excited, and a little bit nervous.

I feel good about the book when I read it, and I have read it quite a few times. I just hope it’s good enough people will want to read the next part too, and the part after that, and so on. There will be a lot of parts.

It’s not quite time yet, but it’s also not far off. The deadline I set myself for my next book is June first. By then I want it to be ready enough that I can start the publishing process.

I’m pretty sure I’ll make it.

I have a few test readers still reading the story and they’ve promised to have it done by June 1. If they’re not done, it’s not the end of the world. I’m confident the story is in a good enough shape I can publish it without making any major changes, and I should be able to iron out the majority of the spelling mistakes myself.

Sure, I’ll miss some, but for now I can live with that. The goal isn’t perfect – it’s good enough.

Also, June first isn’t when I’m publishing. The paperback will be out in mid-June, and the ebook in early July. Even then, I still have time to fix things. This book is the first part of a longer series, and I won’t start advertising it until the third part is out, which will be in September some time if all goes to plan. By then, I expect to have tracked down and located all of the spelling errors I missed on my own.

After that, further errors will have to be fixed as they are discovered. That’s part of the beauty with ebooks. If there’s a spelling error I can correct it and upload a new version of the book. Supposedly, everyone who’ve bought it will get the new version pushed to them, but I’m not sure how well that really works in practice. Perhaps they need to request it – or there may some other requirement before it gets done.

Anyway – it’s not much further, and soon Lost Dogs #1 will be available. I’m starting to get excited.

My latest article for Mythic Scribes is now live. It’s about what I did to launch and promote my book Emma’s Story, and you can read it here.

It’s a fairly long piece that touches upon most of the various aspects of launching the book: selecting a date and setting up preorders, advertising and promotion, formatting for ebook and paperback. The article doesn’t go into great detail on any of it, but rather tries to give an overview of all the different things involved in self-publishing a book – and even then I had to leave some things out.

I’m always a little bit nervous when a new article is going to go live. There are expectations. Mythic Scribes isn’t some little personal blog for just me and my closest friends and family (hi mom). It’s a big site with an active community and tons of daily visitors. I don’t have any exact numbers to share, but the numbers are sky high compared to what I’m getting on this page. On a good day I get double-digit number visitors on this blog.

Regardless of the actual numbers, the point is that a lot of people will see my articles and read them. Hopefully they will find them useful, and usually I get good feedback, but I still worry. Mostly, my main concern is that I’ll get something significantly wrong, or that I’ll unknowingly express some really controversial viewpoint and cause an uproar.

So far that’s not happened, and it probably won’t. I’m a lot less nervous about it than I used to be, but that little nagging worry is still there. Ideally it won’t ever go away completely. If it does, it’ll mean I’ve lost the respect for what I’m doing, and then I shouldn’t be doing it anymore.

What I’m really going for here is that on Sundays when the articles go live I keep refreshing the site to see if it’s there yet or not. So too this time around, and when it finally happened I was met by a really nice and heartwarming surprise. Our site admin, BD, had found my Instagram account, dug out some of the pictures I’d taken of my book, and added them to the article.

Discovering this made me really happy. It’s that warm feeling of when someone goes that extra mile to do something nice for you even though they don’t have to and you don’t expect it. It’s amazing, and it was great way to start my weekend (I’m off Monday’s and Tuesdays).

Also, price hike

One comment I got on the article was that the price on the paperback version is too low. It’s cheap enough people might think there’s something wrong with the story. This obviously isn’t what I want, so I’ll be increasing the price to 6.99 in about a week.

My father, who enjoys messing around with brushes and colours, made this painting of a scene from my book Emma’s Story:

A single light burns at the top of the hill.A village is blind under the stars.

The cover image of Emma’s Story was painted by a friend of mine. You can read more about it here.

After I got the cover and showed it off, it struck me that it would be fun to have some more images from the story to share. It’d also be really fascinating to see how others imagined it.

I’m not sure how many of my friends who read the book are into painting, but I know my dad is (he counts as a friend too), so I asked him. Turns out he was more than happy to help out, and you can see the result above.

What amazed me was that I was able to tell right away which scene it was he’d painted. All of the details add up, and it’s actually really close to how I imagined it myself. Most likely this is what I’ll see next time I read that part.

I hope those of you who’ve already read it will be able to recognize the scene though, but perhaps the caption gave it away?

The scene is from very near the end of the book, so to avoid giving away any spoilers I won’t be going into details about it – other than what you can see for yourself.

In other news, I’ve brought the price of the ebook version of Emma’s Story up to the full retail price ($2.99, £2.49, €2.99) instead of the cheaper launch price. Sales dropped off after the first week, and I figured everyone I know who wanted the book would have gotten it by now.

It’s cheaper than a coffee and a brownie too.

I’m unlikely to do any more promotion of the book for the time being, and anyone who finds it will have heard about it through word of mouth. My thinking is that if you get a recommendation from someone you probably won’t be too fussed about whether the book is 0.99 or 2.99.

Sure, it’s three times the price, but it’s still cheaper than a pint of beer, and it’ll take you longer to read – and hopefully it’ll bring you more enjoyment too.

I’m featured on their list of New Releases for the weekend (even though the book isn’t actually free). My book is the second one in the list so it’s in a good spot for visitors to the site. Check it out, and have a look at the other new releases as well. The link to purchase the book is on that page (so I’m not including it here).

Now, about that release…

Paper crane in a window covered by condensation.

The release was, I’m somewhat surprised to say, not that big of a deal. I expected I’d be a lot more nervous and that I’d be freaking out and refreshing the sales dashboard every thirty seconds to see if someone made a purchase. It didn’t happen like that at all.

Instead, everything just progressed much as expected. The book became available, and the pre-orders showed up as being delivered on the dashboard, and then two more sales showed up towards the end of the day.

It wasn’t quite an anti-climax, because this was what I’d reasonably expected. Sure, I’d hoped for miracles, but I haven’t really put in enough work for any of those to happen. Instead, everything just worked the way it was supposed to.

This morning’s coffee. It is, unfortunately, gone now.

However, what turned out to be really nerve wracking was sending out my first ever newsletter. Through the free book giveaway I took part in during January I’d amassed a small number of subscribers, and now that my book was released I had to tell them about it.

That was scary.

I’ve never done anything like that before, and not only did I have to worry about promoting my work to strangers I’d never met, I also had to figure out how to make a newsletter.

Fortunately it wasn’t very complicated once I set my mind to it, but it took some tinkering before I got it right. Last I checked, no one had unsubscribed from the list, so I can’t have messed up that badly.

According to the mailer-report someone even clicked one of the links in the mail. :D

To be honest, the book’s been done-ish for a while now, and the paperback version has been available for purchase for over a week. However, it’s not until last night that I uploaded the last and final version of the book, both for the ebook and paperback versions.

I sent out print copies of my book to friends, family, and beta readers. When my friend D got hers she tore into it with a vengeance, and she discovered plenty of things I’d missed. I thought my sister had caught it all when she sent me a list of well over forty different things she wanted me to consider.

Turns out that wasn’t all of it.

D identified an issue with my comma usage that both I and my sister had missed. She also located all instances where I’d got my commas wrong throughout the entire story. That’s a whole lot of work, and I’m both impressed and grateful.

I’d have been happy releasing the book in the state it was in, but now that I got these issues pointed out I went ahead and changed most of them. In a handful of places I kept the incorrect punctuation for artistic reasons.

This picture is just here to add some life to the page. It’s got nothing to do with my book.

There were other issues as well, but I won’t bore you with the details. The main point is that I’ve now fixed or considered all of the errors that were pointed out to me, and that I’ve uploaded the final version of the story.

Then, once that was done and the paperback version had cleared the review, I uploaded it again because of a typography error on one of the first pages.

That’s the last of it though. This time I really believe I won’t be making any more changes to the book. I may change the category keywords or the blurb, but that’s another matter.

The final (!) version of the book can be found on Amazon here (US) and here (UK)

The free book giveaway I’m taking part in ends today. There’s a total of 35 books taking part and you can download them for free from this page. Some of the downloads are previews, like mine, while others are complete stories. There are even a few story collections.

Go ahead, get it while it’s still there.

EDIT: Looks like the creator of the giveaway forgot to set an expiration date so it’s still going. I’m taking my book down on Sunday the 28th though.

If you’re just finding my blog for the first time, my book is called Emma’s Story and it’s the one with the trees and snow on the cover (see below). It’s not the full story though, just the first four chapters. I’m hoping it will be enough for readers (that’s You) to get a feel for my writing style and to get an idea of what the story is about.

The style is probably a little bit out of the ordinary, and not everyone will like it. The narration switches back and forth between two different kinds of voice. There’s a close third person voice written in past tense, and there’s a distant omniscient voice written in present tense.

If that doesn’t make sense to you, download the free preview and check it out. You’ll either love it or hate it.

Obviously I want you to like it, but I know it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. In that way, I’m kind of happy I was able to give the book away like this. It’s an opportunity to show off the story to potential readers without them having to make a commitment to buying it.

Imagine you buy a book you think sounds interesting and then the style it’s written in just doesn’t work for you at all. One of my beta readers told me the style felt condescending to them, and they’re probably not the only one. Other beta readers really enjoyed it though, so I kept the style the way it is.

If you already checked out the preview, or if you’re curious about it after just reading about the different styles. Let me know in the comments.

Emma wants what all young anfylk women want, a burrow in the village and a family to fill it with life – and she could have it. Her best friend Torkel has proposed. He’s the only one for her and he’s first in line for the only available burrow in their small hillside village.
It should be easy, but it’s not. Torkel is a dreamer and a scoundrel. A self-styled huntsman and adventurer, with no real grasp of what it means to be a father and a husband.
But time is ticking, and the longer the burrow lies empty the weaker the village’s spirit gets. When an angry bear comes down from the mountains to terrorize their forest the villagers are unable to ward it off on their own.
To seek aid, Emma must travel farther than she’s ever been on her own before. A journey in search of the help her village needs, and the answers her heart desires.
While she’s gone, Torkel has his own ideas for how to impress Emma and make her like him enough to be his wife, completely missing the point. There’s a reason she has a hard time making up her mind…

Okay, so that’s a bit of a chunky blurb, but it does sum up the essence of the story in an honest way without giving away too much.